V-Secure Aims to Stop Intrusion Attacks

No small business owner enjoys the countless intrusions in any given workday, annoying interruptions that keep you from being productive and efficient. But those daily disturbances are nothing when compared to the digital intrusions waiting to assault your network and &#151 literally &#151 bring your business to a crashing halt.

Intrusions are computer attacks that typically come from outside your organization usually with the intention of crashing your network, hijacking your computing power to attack other servers or to mine personal information such as credit card numbers from your network.

V-Secure, a Saddle Brook, N.J.-based company aims to keep intrusions from breaching small business networks with its combination hardware and software intrusion prevention systems (IPS). The appliance &#151 a box that plugs into your company network &#151 patrols the network traffic looking for abnormal behavior.

Intruder Alert
According to Izhar Shay, V-Secure’s CEO, it’s increasingly difficult to tell a DoS attack from regular network traffic. In a DoS attack, a hacker sends tens of thousands of connection requests to a particular server &#151 which must respond to each request. The network can’t handle the weight of the traffic, and it collapses, making it impossible for the business to service its customers.

“Hackers use more and more sophisticated methods,” he said. “They’re using legitimate network protocols to make the traffic look like legitimate sessions, but they’re not.” Shay said the increasing level of threat and technological finesse calls for a new breed of solution.

“Our IPS appliance uses adaptive filtering to distinguish between the good and the bad sessions. It quickly and accurately identifies changes in normal network communication patterns and stops developing attacks without blocking legitimate traffic,” he said.

Who’s a Target?
You might not think your small business is vulnerable to intrusion attacks, but Shay said any PC connected to the Internet is fair game. “Hackers need lots of computing power to launch attacks, so they hijack PCs and create a network of zombies to facilitate the attacks.” Hijacked zombies perform sluggishly and adversely affect your company’s efficiency and productivity.

IPS protect against more than just DoS attacks. Shay said his company’s line of appliances prevent the following attacks:

• Distributed Denial of Service
• Brute force attacks
• Dictionary attacks
• Pre-attack probes
• Network scans
• Web application vulnerability scans
• Protocol violation attacks
• Misuse of memory and CPU resources
• Worm propagation, including Code Red, Nimda and SQL Slammer

Joining Forces to Fight Intrusions
According to Shay, V-Secure uses Adaptive Smart Dynamic Filter (ASDF) technology. What that means is instead of relying just on recognizing the signatures of various known intrusions, V-Secure is self-learning &#151 it studies your network’s behavior and learns what normal network traffic communication looks like. When it comes across abnormal behavior &#151 intrusions &#151 it denies those packets access to your network.

V-Secure also incorporates signature-based ISP technology as a complement to the ASDF. David Lavenda, the company’s chief marketing officer said in a recent statement that, “a signature-based system provides valuable data to the adaptive, behavior-based, IPS engine, so that the engine can adopt more accurate attack countermeasures, faster.”

Be Secure &#151 V-Secure’s line of intrusion protection systems are designed to prevent hackers from attacking or hijacking your network.

Sliding Scale
The V-secure product line comes in three models:

&#8226 V-10
Intrusion Prevention for 10Mbps Ethernet
Interface: 10Base-T
Price: $10,000

&#8226 V-100
Intrusion Prevention for 10/100Mbps Ethernet
Interface: 10Base-T, 100Base-T
Price: $25,000

&#8226 V-1000
Intrusion Prevention for 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
Interface: 10Base-T, 100Base-T, 1000Base-T
Price: Starts at $35,000